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Culture

Japanese language

The Closest language to Japanese is Korean, there are commonalities in the arrangement of subject, direct, object. and predicate. however , there are no determining evidence that they belong to the same linguistic family.

There are many theories about the origin of Japanese language. Japanese has been posited to be one of the Ural Altaic languages, one of the southern, Malayo-Polynesian language, are relative to the Indo-Tibetan languages or one of the Tamil Language. While is origin remain uncertain, The Japanese language did incorporate many Chinese word.

The hiragana and katakana syllabaries were created based on the Chinese reading for the character, resulting in a language that incorporated both Chinese character and Kana syllabaries.

How did the hiragana and katakana syllabaries originate?

We might say that Kana do not convey the meaning of Kanji, but rather stand for their simplified sound.

"The Manyoshu", that was completed in the mid-8th century, contain about 4,500 waka poems : yet most are written with Kanji that had been randomly assigned sound.

After that Kanji was simplified, end of 9th centuries, they had evolved into the current hiragana Katakana, that are even more simple than hiragana, developed alongside the hiragana syllabaries , and was already written words by the beginning of 9th centuries.

Hiragana come to be used in correspondence and narratives, otherwise, Katakana was used for annotation and as phonetic symbols for difficult Kanji.

Kanji

There are said to be some 5,000 kanji, most of which have been adopted into Japanese. There are also Kanji which were created in Japan. however, many Kanji are not necessarily used in daily life, and today, less than 2,000 kanji character have been designated in common use.

Three character in Japanese

There are three character in Japanese languages: Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana. Kanji are ideogram brought from China. Hiragana and Katakana are phonograph which were made by simplifying Kanji. There are thousand of homonyms in Japanese,it was decide that Kanji be include for clarification purposes because Kanji is ideographic.

Vertically and Horizontally

All historical document in Japan are written vertically, long long times ago, Japan was only use vertically. After the introduction of western culture, we needed to accommodate the alphabet and Arabic number. Fortunately, since each individual Kanji and Kana has its own meaning and function, they could be arranged vertically without losing their meaning.nowadays, general book sold in stores are set in vertical text,however as young people find no difficulty reading or writing.